Having step-by-step checklists on hand may help doctors and nurses manage emergencies in the operating room, a new study suggests.

In situations when a person’s heart stops beating on the operating table or a patient begins bleeding uncontrollably, those lists can save time and brainpower, researchers said.

“People have called (checklists) ‘dumbing down’ medicine, but what we showed is that even in this incredibly stressful, high-complexity situation, the teams that worked from a kind of preplanned set of steps had three quarters lower likelihood of missing critical life-saving steps,” said Dr. Atul Gawande, from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who worked on the study.

For the study, he and his colleagues arranged 17 operating room teams to go through 106 simulated surgical crises, with or without the checklists. Every OR team did better when it had the crisis checklists on hand, the researchers reported Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Snowboarding linked to injuries

Introducing snowboarders to the mix at one ski resort in New Mexico led to a small increase in the overall number of injuries on the mountain, according to a new study.

Compared to the two years before snowboarders were allowed at the resort, injuries rose by 13 per cent in the two years after snowboarding was permitted, researchers report in The American Journal of Sports Medicine.

Though the results are only from one mountain, they’re in line with patterns seen elsewhere, according to a researcher who studies snowboard and ski injuries, but was not involved in the new work.

The researchers were not able to say why the number of injuries increased, but previous research suggests snowboarders are more injury-prone than skiers.

Introducing laws banning smoking in enclosed public places can lead to swift and dramatic falls in the number of children admitted to hospital suffering asthma attacks, according to a study in England published on Monday.

Researchers at Imperial College London found there was a 12.3 per cent fall in hospital admissions for childhood asthma in the first year after laws against smoking in enclosed public places and workplaces came into effect in July 2007.

Similar antismoking legislation has been introduced in many other countries, including in the United States where it has also been linked to a reduction in childhood asthma emergencies.

“The findings are good news ... and they should encourage countries where public smoking is permitted to consider introducing similar legislation,” said Christopher Millett from Imperial’s school of public health, who led the study.

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